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I have a little problem. I'm addicted to cookbooks, food writing, recipe collecting, and cooking. I have a lot of recipes waiting for me to try them, and ideas from articles, tv, and restaurants often lead to new dishes. I started losing track of what I've done. So now I'm taking photos and writing about what I've prepared—unless it's terrible in which case I forget it ever happened.

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Thursday, July 14, 2011

I think I might have started a new thing for family birthdays. It's happened twice now, so it's at least on its way to becoming a thing. Since I bake a lot, and I really can't or shouldn't eat as much as I bake, I decided to send cookies to family members on their birthdays. I'm sure that now this is in writing, I'll not have time to send cookies for the next birthday. It might just be a when-I-have-time thing, and that way the cookies will always be a surprise, right? This cookie recipe is from The Greyston Bakery Cookbook, and coconut is added to the dough. I bought a bag of natural, unsweetened, shredded coconut and then worried that the cookies wouldn't be sweet enough since I didn't use the regular, sweetened stuff. I tasted the dough before I baked the cookies to see if I thought I should add more sugar, and it seemed good to me. Kurt was happy to taste test a cookie fresh out of the oven, and his reaction made me confident they were just fine. The cookies almost disappeared before I could box them up for shipping.

There was nothing unusual about making the cookie dough here. You could use chocolate chips, but the recipe called for chunks, so I chopped a bar of bittersweet chocolate into bits. At two different cooking classes I attended, I learned the same lesson from both Nick Malgieri and Alice Medrich. When you chop chocolate into chunks for cookies, you want to leave the chocolate dust behind. Nick Malgieri places the chopped chocolate in a sieve and shakes it to remove the pulverized stuff and keep the chunks. Alice Medrich used her hands to pull the chunks away from the dust on the cutting board. The fine, powdery chocolate muddies the look of the dough and using only the chunks results in a neater cookie. So, cream butter and brown sugar, add an egg and vanilla, sift flour, baking soda, and salt and add oatmeal then add that to butter mixture, then fold in shredded coconut and natural, unsweetened is fine and neat, dust-free, chocolate chunks. Drop into mounds on baking sheets and bake.

These were easy, straightforward cookies, but the addition of coconut to an oatmeal chocolate chunk cookie was new for me. It's an excellent addition, adding a little chewiness, and one I'll continue to include from now on. Actually, now that Kurt knows about this cookie flavor and will no doubt be requesting it frequently, I'll be baking a lot of these cookies.

I haven't been overly fond of coconut in baked goods, mainly because I found them overly sweet. But this sounds so promising! Oatmeal Chocolate Chip is my husband's fave cookie and coconut will just take it up to another level. I am fortunate to have access to freshly grated coconut. Do you think I would need to adjust any other ingredients in cookie recipe to make up for the moisture in fresh coconut?

BTW, the photo of the thick dough on the mixer paddle makes me pine for my KitchenAid, tucked away in a storage unit. 8-(

Nothing like a cookie right out of the oven indeed... I like the oatmeal and the coconut is a nice change-up. I particularly like coconut in its natural form - so happy to hear you went with the unsweetened!

Tracey: Lucky you to have access to fresh coconut! I think you could dry the freshly grated coconut by spreading it on a baking sheet and leaving in a low oven for a while. That might work better than trying to adjust other ingredients. Let me know if you try it!

Epicurious has a similar recipe. My family...I...We've all fallen deeply in love with these cookies. Coconut truly does something magical when paired with oats. I've been meaning to make another batch. Thank you for the reminder.